Learning to write together using groupware

Most studies of collaborative writing have focused on mature writers who have extensive experience with collaborative writing. Typically, these studies also deal with short, somewhat artificial tasks carried out in a laboratory, and thus do not extend over a period of time as real writing usually does. This paper describes an ethnographic study of collaborative writing by two groups of 4 grade six students using synchronous collaborative writing software for one hour per week over a 12 week period. Despite initially having no idea of what it means to write together, and no experience in doing so, both groups produced nearly one dozen short collaboratively conceived, written, and edited documents by the end of the study. A careful analysis of video tape records, written documents, questionnaires, and interviews provided insight into the way in which novices learn to write together, and the role groupware technology can play in the process. It also demonstrated the importance of concepts such as awareness, ownership, and control in the writing process, and highlighted many examples of strengths and weaknesses in the writing software. INTRODUCTION Writing together, while often necessary, is never easy. We have seen this repeatedly in our research into the ways in which people write together, how people learn to write together, and how computerbased tools can help with the learning and writing processes [1, 13, 17, 22]. Other investigators have studied collaborative writing among mature writers [3, 6, 11, 23]. A number of theories of collaborative writing have been developed [6, 23, 26] to characterize the writing process. There have also been a number of tools designed to support collaborative writing [1, 7, 12, 18, 20]. We learned that experienced writers have biases towards groupware based on the way they write using conventional non-groupware tools, and they often resist the new paradigms introduced by groupware technology. In order to learn more about the process of collaborative writing, we decided to focus this study on novice writers learning to use groupware to write collaboratively. We chose to observe extended usage of groupware technology in the realistic setting of a classroom in order to observe the effects of groupware tools on the collaborative writing process and to learn how to design better software. In our study, two groups of grade six students worked together for twelve weeks to produce a magazine on prejudice (see Figure 1). The students learned how to use Aspects2, a commercial synchronous collaborative editor, and developed the skills necessary to work as a group and to successfully write together. Although collaborative writing is a common practice among mature writers, our experience with the SASSE [1] group editor suggests that novice writers are uncertain as to how to proceed, and often have difficulty even understanding what is meant by collaborative writing. Other researchers have dealt with group writing in the classroom [4, 8], identifying the difficulties facing novice writers in collaborative situations, without the added complexity of using groupware tools. Our early trials using naive collaborative writers highlighted the importance of demonstrating to novices a variety of approaches to group writing. Because of this, we began our study by providing the students with training in collaborative writing, and concluded by observing their attempts to write together using groupware. 1This paper combines materials presented in the paper appearing at CHI'95 [16] and CSCL'95 [24]. 2 Aspects was developed by Group Logic Inc., formerly Group Technologies Inc.